


Not as Scary as They Paint Her

by TigerDragon



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Captivity, F/F, Not Romance, Past Brainwashing, Revenge, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-04-29 20:11:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5141018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hе так стра́шен чёрт, как его́ малю́ют, the Russians say - 'the devil is not so terrible as he is painted.' </p><p>Taken off the street by American counterintelligence agents, Natasha Romanoff finds herself in the hands of the most cunning and dangerous of their patrons. Leave it to Loki of Asgard to make the Black Widow an offer she can't refuse, and dangle the promise of a new life she might or might not truly want in front of her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, we do not claim any ownership of Marvel's IPs.

Natalia Alianova Romanoff came awake without opening her eyes and without changing her breathing, because that was how she had been trained. The dull pain that she had expected in the back of her head was disconcertingly absent, and her skin was free of the raw feeling of abrasion and laceration that should have persisted even with bandaging or anesthetics - neither of which seemed to be present either.

The bed she was lying on was luxurious but not quite soft, the sheets a cotton so fine that it shamed silk, the blankets draped over her definitely fur, possibly wolf or bear. More than one kind, certainly. She was quite naked, and someone had undone her hair, which meant that she was without any of her mission equipment. It was therefore doubly unlikely that this was a safehouse on which she had not been briefed (though the furnishings alone would probably have been beyond the means the KGB would have expended on a field operation).

Her breathing tried to change, and she fell back into the discipline of training. _Determine your situation. Review how you arrived. Develop options._

The last clear thing in her memory was the snowy New York street corner where she’d been waiting for her target - the shops strung with Jul lights and warding charms, a Jul tree across the street twinkling its electric candles to the cold sky. Then the flash and disordered reflex - she thought she’d taken down three men, perhaps four, before something had struck her like a steam-hammer and left her slumped on the ground. Even then, before consciousness had quite fled her, there had been voices. Men’s voices.

_“She’s secure - we can take her from here. Doesn’t look like much, but she put up a hell of a fight.” American, educated, law enforcement. Relieved and determined._

_“Appearances can be tricky things.” American accent, false, cool and detached. Amused. “I’ll take her. Anything you could learn from her, I’ll see that you know.”_

_“That’s not....” Rising tension. Startled, trapped._

_“I have the right. You may speak with your superiors if you feel my assistance is more costly than you would prefer, but I think you’ll find them a poor audience.” Smug. In control and enjoying it._

_“Why?”_

_“She interests me.”_

“How long are you going to lie there, pretending to sleep? I’m just curious if I have time to slip out and fetch another bottle of wine.” A woman’s voice, from the same direction as faint sounds of traffic, low and sweet and speaking Russian like a native, but the language was too classical - too perfect - to be from home.

Natasha opened her eyes and sat up, holding the blankets to her chest, projecting nervousness as she catalogued what she saw. Room: large, high ceilings, two wooden doors and one entire wall made of glass, double doors leading to a balcony; furniture: bed, nightstands, upholstered bench, chaise lounge, several shelves with art objects. Everything expensive and high-quality. Time: night, after midnight. Location: probably New York, judging by the skyline.

Occupants: Herself, and a tall, dark-haired woman lounging on the chaise with a glass of wine dangling from her fingertips, watching Natasha and looking amused.

Natasha’s face fell into neutral as she realized whose bed she was lying in. There weren’t many pictures of Asgardians, especially of Loki, but there were enough if you had the files of the KGB. Enough to recognize her on sight.

“Well, I suppose that introductions would be superfluous. You know who I am, I know who you are.” Loki rose from the chaise, her silken green skirts swirling around her and flickering with gold highlights from the city glow outside, the dark green jacket that hung past her waist brushing those same sparks away like a shadow. “There’s clothing in the closet that should suit you, if you’d prefer to be dressed while we speak. I’d offer you a glass, but what’s in mine will have to do for both of us.” The bed shifted when she sat down in front of Natasha, but neither of them changed expressions by a fraction. “It’s a lovely vintage. Would you like to try it?”

“No, thank you,” Natasha replied as if they were at a state dinner. “I don’t drink.”

“Unless you’re working.” Loki’s lips curved up at the corners mildly. “I’ve broken the enchantments preventing you from indulging yourself outside of your tasks, if that was your concern.”

Natasha’s lashes twitched, very slightly, and Loki laughed. “Too old-fashioned? I corrected the post-hypnotic compulsive framework constraining your neural matrix with a heuristic counter-meme. No? It’s so hard to remember where you people are in the development of psychology in this century.”

“I’m still on the clock until extraction and debrief,” Natasha pointed out.

“Mmm. That is a pretty quandary, isn’t it?” Loki laughed down in her throat and reclined on the bed, holding the wine glass up so it caught the light from the window on its surface in delicate spirals. “Are you actually free, or is it only the illusion of freedom brought on by my claim to have freed you? The people who enchanted - your pardon, _trained_ you were quite gifted for amateurs so recently descended from apes. I almost wanted to give them a ribbon. Or would you rather I torture them to death slowly? I’m sure that could be equally appropriate as a reward for their creativity.”

Natasha let the blankets fall to her waist. The goddess stretched out on the bed in front of her remained interested in the wine glass for about another minute, then rolled up on her side to fix Natasha’s body with a similarly languid regard.

“Is that why you brought me here? A curiosity?”

“Questions of motive are always the most difficult and least interesting to answer,” Loki sighed, resting her cheek against her knuckles and sipping slowly from the wine. “I brought you here because I wanted to. I thought you’d be much more interesting to keep than let the Americans lock in a cell and pick over like particularly lackluster vultures.”

An auburn eyebrow made a subtle arch. “Not for my sparkling conversational skills.”

“Not purely for that, though I have all the weapons I could possibly want.” Loki’s lips curved up at the corners in another lazy, self-indulgent smile. “But most of them aren’t as pleasant to have as company or as aesthetically delightful.”

A hint of a frown tightened Natasha’s brow for a fraction of a second. “Pleasant.”

Loki studied her, the green of those too-seeing eyes gleaming like a cat’s, and then shifted back up to sit. Eased the long jacket from her shoulders and draped it almost carelessly across Natasha’s, brushing a few strands of red away from her face. “Yes.”

The Russian didn’t move. Any human head of state or general or power broker of any kind, she could have dealt with. Had dealt with, in the past. She didn’t even know how much sleep Asgardians needed, or much of anything about them beyond their incredible strength and near-invulnerability. Not to mention their weapons and technology.

“If you’re thinking of trying to kill me, the candlestick on the nightstand is likely to give you the most focused impact. You could try for my temple - the bone is thinner there, as it is in a human, and you might be able to concuss me.” Loki’s soft, silken voice was as objectively detached as any of her trainers had been, but there was a low warmth under it that caressed where their coldness had reproved. A lure, perhaps. A tempting one.

The entire scenario was a lure. Words spun beautifully out of an unknown number of lies, an offer of luxury or something like it, of avoiding the Americans. Impossible fairy stories.

Natasha’s breath hitched subtly as she realized that she was thinking. Trying to evaluate the truth instead of recording data to report. Trying to make a decision instead of responding to her directives.

Now that she was paying attention, she couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. If Loki had replaced the Red Room’s compulsory framework with one of her own, it didn’t have the same firewalls against critical thinking.

Loki’s fingertips stroked another strand of hair behind her ear, and those green eyes looked down at her with a patience that might outlast the building around them.

She didn’t try to stop Natasha, either, when the Russian lurched out of the bed and found herself in the bathroom, working the controls of a shower built for a football team, staring at her own fingers on the mosaic of glass tiles. A thousand tiny, broken reflections of the Asgardian stepped out of a thousand equally tiny doors, shutting each behind them, and stood there in silence while the hot water poured over Natasha’s skin and down her face. Soaked into her hair.

Waited without impatience while the steam erased the reflections from the world.

It should have been impossible, to cry when it wasn’t a weapon. Natasha didn’t know how long it lasted, only that it felt like it was her own tears washing over her body, flowing and flowing and flowing.

When she stopped, there was still hot water. A small part of her mind wondered if it was magic or just money.

“I’m going to destroy it.”

Her voice was harsh from sobbing, but Loki’s was still poisoned silk. “When do we start?”


	2. Chapter 2

There were two ways into Arkhangelsk: by the White Sea, frozen solid six months of the year and in Russian territorial waters all twelve; and through the highly-secured naval base that controlled the entire town. Natasha had been there before, three times via army trucks and once by an old ice-breaker.

She hadn’t used either way this time. She and Loki Odinsdatter had come down from the sky in a fury of light through the midst of a storm fit to shake the world, not onto land where the rainbow bridge would leave its distinctive mark but onto the very water itself, and then walked untouched and undampened through the flurries of snow and sleet on a skein of ice that formed like a path in front of them and unraveled again behind.

They had gone through the streets of the city walking on the snow and leaving it unmarked behind them, two ghosts keeping company with the distant thunder, keeping silence together. That was easy with Loki - the Asgardian would speak when she felt the need or not, as pleased her, but she rarely made Natasha feel as though words were required in reply. They scarcely disturbed the soldiers huddled in their sentry points and clutching their coats about them, and so it was not difficult to find the completely unimportant warehouse on which no visible guards were posted at all.

The inside of that warehouse was painted in a mural of green meadows and blue sky. Megawatt full-spectrum lamps paved the ceiling into the summer sun, and in the center, like a life-size diorama, was a charmingly perfect house and a garden. The flowers froze as they passed, and the guards - uniformed but without insignia - slumped in a sleep that could be as lethal in such cold as a wound. Loki stopped on the doorstep, a wicked smile of mirth at her lips, and then opened the door for Natasha as if she were a gallant escorting a lady inside.

The formal parlor held tables with gracefully-arching legs, tufted sofas with lions’ feet, and numerous mirror-backed china cabinets. Instead of gold-rimmed plates, the shelves held dozens of objects: a worn locket on a chain. A leather briefcase. An unframed photograph of a stern-looking family. Five marbles. A _matryoshka_ doll. Numerous unopened letters. Their reflected images became indistinct as Loki’s presence frosted the glass.

Natasha paused and watched the ice obscure a toy dog.

“That one was mine,” she observed.

“Would you like it back, _audr_?” Loki’s voice was mild as spring in the midst of the frozen wind which swirled about them without touching them, her green eyes watching Natasha as intently as they did the many doors and the curving stairs they half-concealed.

Natasha shook her head once, though she melted her fingerprints onto the glass. “Before  Komandir Volkov put it in here, it belonged to another girl. Killing her was my one of my tests.” She took her hand away, and the warm ovals quickly froze over as well, and soon the entire cabinet was sheathed in glittering swirls of ice. “It should stay buried here with her.”

“As you like. Though if you’d told me, we could have brought Volkov’s body along to bury with them. What was left of it.” Loki turned away and reached out her hand, sending delicate gusts of wind through the house that opened every door they touched, her eyes half-closed in the way Natasha had come to recognize as concentration. “There’s a sealed room in the basement - mystically as well as mechanically. A few more men guarding the upper floors. No children. Shall we go down and meet Comrade Polzin, then?”

Natasha nodded, then swept silently to the stairs. They were much dirtier than she remembered - with no enthralled children to sweep them, cleaning was apparently too much of a security risk.

Faintly glowing sigils flared to life as they descended, yellow on the top steps and deepening to an angry crimson the further they came. When someone set foot on the bottom landing, Natasha knew, sparks would fly from the runes and burn whoever was standing there - intensify to full flames, if the trespasser didn’t leave. But Loki’s laughter spilled over the hissing of the flames, dousing them in flurries of ice that seemed to condense from the air around her until the runes themselves fractured and bled from the walls in frozen crystals the color of dried blood.

A small daub of plastique blew the heavy bolt and Natasha kicked the door open, the familiar weight of a Browning Hi-Power held professional in both hands as she swept the large room - map tables, radio consoles, computers mixed in with older equipment and none of it running, one target at the small table near the best radios with a silver tea set already starting to mist over in front of her. Yelizaveta Polzin, former Colonel of the KGB, brushed a few strands of steely gray hair from her face and stood up very slowly, her hands held out in front of her visibly.

“Good afternoon, Natalia Alianovna,” she said in a polite and maternal voice, her Russian classical and educated in spite of the faint Tyvan accent. “Welcome home. Will you come and have tea? Two sugars and lemon is still how you prefer it?”

A shadow passed over Natasha’s face. If Polzin noticed, she didn’t let on.

“One sugar, please,” she responded, as she had done hundreds of times. She lowered her weapon.

“Of course.” Polzin shivered a little in the cold, her eyes sweeping behind Natasha for a moment, but if she saw anything there, she gave no sign. The china must have been very cold to touch, but she arranged both teacups just as they had always been arranged and poured fresh tea from the teapot. It steamed fiercely in the cold air, already bleeding away its heat. “Come and sit. You must tell me all about your time away.”

They sat on the industrial grey office chairs, the tea set resting on a map of London. Natasha’s eyes flicked over the several locations in red. She wondered how much in the room was news to Loki. “The journey was long, but ended well.”

“We have been worried about you. Our friends in New York were very distressed when they could not find you, and even more concerned when it seemed the Americans did not have you either. It is a great relief to see that you have come home safe to us where we can look after you. Time away is always so disorienting.”

The phrase should have clicked home in her head like a control rod, dampening down her thoughts and making it easier to focus on her report. The expectation was so familiar and so certain, even now, that it startled her when she felt nothing. The words were only words, and the machinery in her head was silent.

Some small sign of her disorienting clarity must have shown on her face, or maybe it was just her silence; either way, Polzin’s eyes widened a fraction and she became very still, even her breathing as carefully controlled as a metronome. “Natalia,” she said, and her voice control was commendable for how calm and natural she sounded in spite of what was unquestionably fear creeping up inside her, “don’t you think some time in the cabinet would be restful?”

The cabinet. A real one, at first--not a punishment for a naughty child, but a place to make the world go away for a little while. Later, after she outgrew the storage space next to the sink, it had been a sort of meditation - imagining the close, dark walls, the safety of it, the quiet.

Now it seemed absurd.

“Let me see,” Natasha murmured, watching dread crawl up Polzin’s throat, “What was the next one?” The last failsafe, the off-switch - it had only been used on her twice. Something from Carroll - Loki had showed it to her in a book. “‘A watch by the day and not by the hour’, wasn’t it? Ridiculous when they’re just words.”

Polzin tried to stand up - futile, since Natasha was far too quick to get away from and her former teacher well knew it - but Loki’s hand came down on her shoulder and pinned her in the chair effortlessly while the rest of the goddess faded into visibility. “It’s very rude to leave in the middle of tea,” she whispered in Polzin’s ear, “and I wouldn’t like you to be rude to this young lady. Believe me, you wouldn’t enjoy it.”

Shock, terror and pain vied for dominance on Polzin’s face as Natasha calmly finished her tea. “Care to share any more details of the Red Room with me before I go?”

“You mean before I go,” Polzin said, recovering enough composure to sound calm in spite of the way her knuckles were white where her hands gripped each other. “I suppose there’s no harm in it now - it doesn’t exist anymore, after all. You and your friend’s work, I expect.”

“Not much of it,” Natasha admitted. “Still, it’s unwise to throw away intel even if you don’t think you’ll need it. You taught me that.” She refilled her cup and flipped over a clean, unused one. “This is actually fairly good tea. My Lady?”

“I think I will.” Loki stepped around table and poured from the lightly frosted pot, which in her hands still produced tea hot enough to spill great clouds of steam into the half-frozen air. She favored Polzin with a smile that seemed to very nearly break the older woman’s nerve, though it was a fair and lovely expression to look on, and then seated herself gracefully in one of the slightly substandard factory-made chairs. The incongruity of the fine Western clothing in which she’d dressed for the occasion and the surroundings tempted Natasha to laughter, but she restrained herself. It would not have had the correct effect on her teacher.

“You were a very fine student, Alianovna,” Polzin murmured, stirring her tea to mix the fresh heat with the chilled water before taking another sip. “Of everything I regretted leaving behind when I was invited to retire, I think I missed you the most often. Particularly your dancing.”

“‘What we own, we don't keep; when we lose, we cry.’” Natasha stirred sugar into her fresh cup. “Perhaps it is good that I owned nothing, not even myself.”

“Come now, you know very well that all property belongs to the people. As did we, though not so much as you did.” The half-chiding way Polzin said it did nothing to hide the sadness in her eyes. “But now you have stolen yourself, it seems, and ruined much of the State’s property. What will you do next?”

“Haven’t thought about it,” Natasha said, watching Loki watch both Russians.

Polzin laughed and sipped her tea again, her tension relaxing ever so slightly - resignation, perhaps, or just the distraction of the conversation. “I suppose you are long out of the habit. You could come home still - your skills are valuable, even if you bury all of us, and we are not so popular with Moscow as we once were in any case. Or perhaps the West might take you, if you wished such a life. You will, I think, not lack for opportunities in employment.”

“Home.” Natasha’s gaze drifted to the far distance. Then her eyes snapped back onto Polzin like shackles. “Perhaps.” Then she put her cup carefully on the table deliberately out of alignment with the tea set. When she stood up, neither of the two other women did.

“Thank you for the tea,” Natasha said, and shot Polzin in the forehead.

The chair banged on the floor like an echo of the shot, but Loki finished her tea and waited until the blood began oozing toward her delicately heeled boots before standing up. “Shall we go home then, _valdyr_?” she asked mildly, running a light but possessive hand across Natasha’s shoulders.

“Wherever you’d like,” Natasha replied, holstering her gun and picking over the maps and files and thumb drives left on the tables. “She was the last of the Red Room handlers, and it will take some time to track down whatever operatives are left.”

“Does it feel any better now?” Loki inquired softly, near enough that Natasha could smell her perfume but not quite touching. “There is a deep satisfaction in vengeance, I find, but it leaves such an emptiness behind where the hatred was. Sometimes I miss it when it’s gone.”

Natasha’s hands continued their work while she considered the question. “There’s an emptiness,” she agreed after several moments, “but there always was. Now that it’s my emptiness, it’s easier to breathe.”

It was only when she was finished and turned away toward the door that Loki’s arms slipped around her in a wordless embrace. The air had grown still and warmer, but she was beginning to feel it now and it drew a shiver from her - Loki, still unspeaking, drew the winter coat from her shoulders and draped it around Natasha’s own entirely practical winter garments like a cloak. It warmed her more than could possibly be natural.

“We will return to Asgard for now,” Loki told her, the quiet authority fitting about her as warmly as the coat did. “There will be wine and song and quiet, for a time, and perhaps some mischief. Until you have need of them again, I will fill your days.”

Natasha nodded once. “I’m a better dancer than singer,” she said, ghost of a smile on her lips.

“Then perhaps I will see that you dance for me, as well.” Loki laughed, soft and indulgent, guiding her from the room and up the stairs with the brush of fingertips at the small of her back - so light they were barely perceptible, and yet she felt them through the layers of cloth about her. “Come along, _gullrauđr_. We will leave this place to memory.”

The cold and the silence filled up the room behind them, the radio still playing its music unheeded, and the chilled blood crawled on across the floor as if searching for an escape of its own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Russian proverb: What we own, we don't keep; when we lose, we cry. (Chto imeyem — ne khranim, poteryabshi — plachem.)


	3. Chapter 3

The golden halls of Asgard were bright with torches and full of laughter, as they often were, but the shadowed stair by which Loki made her way to the revelry was as empty and still as an untended grave. She passed by a few cunningly concealed niches by which one might observe the deeds of others unseen, found the entrance she sought and paused to adjust her skirts. 

“They look exactly like they did when you finished dressing,” Natasha observed.  

“Not that anyone will notice,” Loki jested softly, turning a sly smile on her companion. “After the work the Ljosalfar put into your wardrobe, I expect you’ll be the object of all eyes.”

The Midgardian rolled her shoulders underneath her new jacket. It wasn’t exactly leather and it wasn’t exactly cloth; nearly as good as Kevlar for stopping blades, much better than it at stopping spells, and worked with intricate, twisting patterns whose edges sometimes caught the light in etchings of oxblood and smoke.

The pants were the same, and both the hidden and overt holsters for her weapons worked to complement the design. The boots--

Well. The boots were magic, or sufficiently advanced tech, and Natasha only took them off to bathe or, occasionally, when she slept. 

The corner of her mouth quirked upwards briefly. “I’m still impressed that anyone is more enraptured by deadly beauty than Russians. It must be your sheer number of near-death experiences.” 

“We do accumulate quite a few, but there is a certain gift that the elf-smiths have for expressing it. Besides, if you’re going to have a weapon around long enough, there really is no reason not to gild it.” Loki’s eyes danced, and then she tapped a hidden catch and stepped out into the shadows dancing with torch-light. They went in silence, unseen and unnoticed, until Loki set her eyes on a dark-haired warrior with her hand on the arm of Thor (whose face even Midgard knew well) and slipped up behind her like an emerald-clad wraith.

“My dear Sif!” Her voice was so bright and cheerful, so full of light mirth, that it tempted Natasha to forget how deliberately Loki had crept up behind them. Before the second word had fully left Loki’s lips, Sif had rounded on her, bracer at Loki’s throat and hand on her sword. Her expression shifted from clear-eyed alarm to burning anger before her cloak had stopped stopped swirling around her fighting stance. Then she snorted in disgust and stood down, glaring at Loki’s pleasant expression. Loki, unperturbed, was still speaking as if nothing had happened. “You must tell me how your ride of the Reaches of the Nine Realms suited you - surely you have many a fine tale to tell, and I would hear all of them as quickly as you can tell them.” 

“Loki,” Sif said through clenched teeth. “The favor of the Fates be with you.” 

“Sister!” Thor boomed, completely ignoring the emotional tension between the two women to wrap his enormous arms around the sorceress. “How glad I am to see you! We will share many tales this night!”

“As many as you like, my darling brother.” Loki laughed, her mirth so bright and clear of undertones that it took Natasha off-guard entirely, and cast her arms across Thor’s broad shoulders in careless delight. “But come, let me show you something you’ve not seen the like of in centuries. Her name is Natasha, and she’ll be attending me from now on. She’s perfect - better than father’s Einherjar by far. Natasha, come and meet my brother and my dear friend Sif.”

The inflection on ‘friend’ was full of poison needles, which was almost a relief - a touch of Loki’s usual habits in the midst of such strange openness.

Romanova stepped forward, bowing and holding her fist to her chest in the gesture she’d learned her first five minutes in Asgard, deepened both for Thor’s status and for...whatever he meant to Loki. 

When Thor returned the gesture - much shallower and not as crisply, of course - it wasn’t a surprise. She’d read his KGB dossier several times, as well as the documentation of other organizations, and it was clear that Thor liked to play friends with Midgardians. He wasn’t terrible at it, either - many of the humans who’d spent any time at all with him loved him, and he only occasionally left Midgardians hanging in the middle of a battle. Given his obliviousness to Sif and Loki’s enmity, it was possible that he genuinely believed he was a friend to all mortals.

“You must be impressive indeed to win my sister’s favor!” he said, grinning and clasping her shoulder with a surprising lack of crushing force. “Never before has she taken a mortal retainer.” 

Natasha’s eyelashes fluttered once. “You’re too kind,” she smiled. She glanced at Loki, whose expression was benevolent, and caught Sif staring at her as though Natasha were some strange creature who might turn into a cloud of poison gas or bats at any moment. 

“He truly is,” Loki teased, reclaiming Natasha’s hand from Thor and smiling up at him as if they were schoolchildren. “But come, have you slipped your keeper? Is the Son of Coul not about to count your flagons for you? If so, we had best make merry while the merry-making is to be had.”

Thor laughed. “Indeed! Come, Sif, tell us of your ride,” he urged, and pulled both the Asgardians towards the feasting tables - Natasha, immediately novelty exhausted, seemed to have slipped his mind and both Sif and Loki seemed to have trouble taking their eyes off him when there wasn’t a pressing reason not to. It was more or less expected that she’d follow along after, and she would, but there was a certain pleasure in lingering where she was and studying the room - that whatever Sif or anyone else who met her tonight might think, Loki would no more demand she trail after her like a lapdog than try to order a hawk to pass up a meal. It was a small freedom, but it was sweeter than wine. 

“Whatever I expected when I heard Loki’d brought someone back from Midgard with her, I don’t think it was you,” a man’s voice - American, a decade or so older than she was, good-humored but with a rueful cast to it - spoke up as his movement pricked the edge of her awareness, and he was standing there with a mug of mead in each hand when she turned to look. Not tall, not short, pleasant-faced but with slightly thinning hair, dressed plainly by the local standard and wearing a smile that went with the voice; he would have made a good bartender in some quaint New England pub from an American film, she thought. “Phil Coulson. Drink?”

“Thanks.” She accepted the mug, a tiny grimace coming at the taste, but enjoying the sweet burn of it in the back of her throat. That was another small freedom she was glad to have. 

“Thor’s keeper, hm?” 

“Something like that. I was working for ... well, it doesn’t really matter, but I was supposed to look into the way things actually were and found out a little more than I should have. Odin apparently decided he liked the way I pushed paper, so here I am. Last year Thor had a particularly impressive party that wrecked a couple of buildings and the All-Father decided he needed a personal reminder not to drink and drive giant goats.” Coulson knocked back a slug of his mead and smiled with the air of a man who’d long ago decided that life was too absurd not to enjoy. “So here I am, babysitting the God of Thunder.”

Natasha absorbed this. In the far corner it looked like what was maybe a fist fight or maybe a dance battle was starting between two cliques. 

“How do you stop him? You can’t exactly take away his keys.”

“I give him the same look of paternal disapproval my dad used to give me. Usually he falls in line." He took a drink. "Also Odin gave me an über-taser. So Loki, huh?”

The mead was much, much stronger than any beer or cider on Earth. Comfortingly, it still tasted bad. Natasha let herself smile. “Yes.” 

The Son of Coul took another drink. Waited. 

“C’mon, nothing?” he whined after another few moments. “I’m gonna start guessing and watching for micro-expressions, which are hideously unreliable but will at least give me something to do.” 

Natasha’s smile widened. “What were you expecting? I like hearing rumors about myself.”

“Well, it’s never happened before, so you gotta speculate about what kind of person would get Loki’s attention. I was betting some kind of stage magician, or maybe a total lunatic; she’s got a weird sense of humor. But fancy stage dressing aside, you seem like a young, very attractive Russian woman with a lot of martial arts training - more like someone the Valkyries would drag in.” Coulson chuckled and toasted her with his mostly-empty mug. “Of course, one of the rumors going around was that you were a movie star, so you can tell people were pretty much stabbing in the dark.”

Romanova raised her glass half an inch in Coulson’s direction. “You definitely figure out too much.” The scuffle across the room had turned into a drinking contest. They were about five tankards in. Natasha’s own mug was nearly empty, and everything was pleasantly warm. 

“Rumor-sharing has to wait a minute,” Coulson said, his eyes suddenly on the other side of the room, and then he breathed out a long bittersweet sigh as his eyes tracked a gorgeous blonde man with an unusually close-clipped hairstyle for the locale. “And there’s the best part of my month. Captain Rogers never disappoints.”

Natasha followed the look. Remembered the photos from more files. “Wait, is that...”

“Captain America,” Coulson breathed. 

“Alive,” Natasha said.

“Well, that is what the Valkyries do - swoop in at the moment of your death and extract you. He would have been quite a prize to miss.” There was hero-worship in plenty on Coulson’s face, but not only that - Natasha had seen men love-sick often, some of them over her, and it was a familiar expression. “I was here for a whole year before I found out he was in Valhalla. Most terrible waste of my life.”

“Because pining at him across a room once a month isn’t?” Natasha frowned. Her mug was empty. Clearly that was why she was...conversational.

“I’m going to talk to him eventually,” Coulson defended himself. “I’m working up to it.”

“I have a terrible idea,” Natasha said. “Maybe they were right to never let us drink.” Glancing around, she saw no servants near them, and simply dropped the tankard to the floor with a dull thud. Then she started walking.

She had to skirt the feast tables, the roasting pit, and some impromptu dancing, but she was over to the American icon in no time.

She tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “Want to spar?”

The bluest eyes she’d ever seen looked down at her in momentary confusion and concern. “Hi,” he blinked. “I haven’t seen you before.” 

“New girl,” she waved off. “Spar?”

“Uh, I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” he patted her arm. “Do you want to sit down? Maybe have some water. The guys will behave themselves, won’t they,” he added over his shoulder to a group of men in various states of drunkenness and uniform - she even saw a few Russian coats from the Great Wars. The men gave a general murmur of agreement in several languages, to the effect that they knew how to treat a lady.

She would probably be embarrassed later about starting a fight in front of patriotic heroes of the Motherland. At the moment, she was just annoyed at this American for patronizing her. She was forced to admit that he had excellent reflexes, since the armbar she put him in ought to have been locked in and well on the way to dislocating his shoulder before he had a chance to react, but it still drew a very satisfying grunt of pain from him. 

Space was going to be necessary. She picked a table to vault and waved down at him. “Coming up?”

He gave her an irritated look and she wasn’t sure if he was going to continue until the men behind him took up an encouraging chant of his surname. 

Captain America glared at her in irritation, and then he swung himself onto the table close enough that she had to jump his leg sweep, then fall backwards onto one hand as he lunged forward. She hooked a leg around his waist and twisted around and behind him, landing a knife-hand to the back of his neck in the process.

“Okay, fine,” he said, half annoyed and half enjoying himself. “Let’s do this.” Another round of cheers went up, this time not limited to the twentieth-century crowd.

It’d been years since she’d used the full range of her skills outside of refresher training - most of her kills were over before the target even knew there was any danger - and it was strangely exhilarating. He was stronger than she was - unnaturally so, strong enough to splinter wood with his hands - but not much faster, and she was a better improviser (though not by as much as she was used to, either). The alcohol in her system did a great deal to dull the pain of her steadily mounting collection of bruises, and she had to satisfaction of putting the great American hero on his back not once but three times before he managed to put her in a grounded armlock. She could have used any of the dozen weapons on her to put him down, but it  _ was _ a spar and she slapped her hand against the floor to signal her acceptance of his skill. After a moment, he let her go.

She’d never contemplated having to fight someone with seventy years of practice before. Obviously she was going to need to revisit her training. 

“Very impressive, Captain Rogers. You continue to be my father’s prize acquisition, as always.” Loki’s voice was all cool amusement as she swept through the sudden space that opened around her; the edge of her skirt swirled almost against Natasha’s fingertips when she stopped, and the room practically held its breath on the edge of the cheer it’d started. 

“Ma’am,” he acknowledged, only a bit breathless. 

Natasha pushed herself up onto her feet, suddenly flushed and on edge in the social tension, but the dark emerald jewels of Loki’s eyes were only unreadable - there was no banked anger or disapproval there. “Practice,” she said, the half-truth strange on her lips, and Loki chuckled down in her throat. The sound of her laughter seemed to unfreeze the crowd, because people finally started cheering and clapping Rogers on the back, but Loki stayed where she was - looking at Natasha, smiling.

“Did you enjoy him,  _ audr _ ?” Loki’s voice was low and private, quiet enough to be lost in the crowd and full of strange promise. “Something could be arranged.”

Natasha tilted her head a fraction of an inch, and she said nothing for a long moment of contemplation. “I would like to spar with him again,” she said finally. In her peripheral vision she saw Asgardians clapping Rogers on the shoulder and Coulson standing to the side trying not to hyperventilate. Loki tracked her eyes with a single glance and chuckled again - barely a breath.

“We’ll see to it that you do,” she said, and then raised her voice. “Son of Coul, I believe the champion of the hour’s lips are dry. What is a servant to the host of our revels if he does not see that remedied?”

Fresh laughter and cheers rolled through the room, Thor’s great booming mirth among them, but it was Coulson’s startled eyes and the slow, slow smile at the edge of his mouth that Natasha saw most. He carried the biggest drinking horn in the hall to the great barrels of mead, filled it with his own hand and brought it to Rogers, who thanked him for his trouble with a smile. 

And Loki laughed, scarcely seen and unheard in the company’s celebration of the moment, while her hand clasped Natasha’s wrist and held the still-quick pulse there.


End file.
